Court Refuses to Shutter Tracker Linked to Pirate Bay

Share

Court Refuses to Shutter Tracker Linked to Pirate Bay

A Stockholm court is refusing to order a Swedish internet provider to cut off a site the studios claim is The Pirate Bay's new torrent tracker.

The Pirate Bay, the world's most notorious filesharing website, announced two weeks ago it was abandoning its tracker, which had been the world's largest – and a magnet for litigation – for years. The move was prompted by the emergence of DHT and PEX technologies, which allow peers to locate one another without a tracker, the site's operators wrote.

Neij and three co-founders were convicted in Stockholm and sentenced to a year in jail each in April for facilitating copyright infringement while running The Pirate Bay. The site is a gateway to copyrighted movies, music, games and software, with 22 million registered users.

Wednesday's development is the latest in a string of attempts by Hollywood and the Swedish government to try to shutter The Pirate Bay following the convictions. But The Bay has outrun court orders to shut down, while defeating efforts to force internet service hosts to black out the site.

A Stockholm court on Wednesday said an ISP called Parlane is not required to block OpenBittorent. The court said the ISP is not liable for any infringement the tracker may facilitate.

Hollywood's attorney, Monique Wadsted, noted that the court did not rule on the studio's allegations that OpenBitTorrent was a front for The Pirate Bay, a charge that's still pending.

"The court has not touched on the link between the tracker and The Pirate Bay, and that all the .torrent files on The Pirate Bay include [OBT's] tracker as the default tracker," she told Swedish media, according to TorrentFreak. "The day we checked, there were 550,000 works that file-sharers [could download] through the tracker."